A Perfect Spy

Pym had already appointed Christmas to be the jolliest of his life and so it was — despite a letter of appalling misery from Rick describing the privations of “a small Private hotel in the wilds of Scotland where the meagrest of life’s Necessities are a Godsend.” He meant, I discovered later, Gleneagles. Christmas Eve came. Pym as youngest lit the candles and helped Frau Ollinger lay the presents round the tree. It had been wonderfully dark all day and in the afternoon thick snowflakes began swirling in the streetlights and clogging the tramlines. The Ollinger daughters arrived with their escorts, followed by a shy married couple from Basel over whom some shadow hung, I forget what. Next a French genius called Jean-Pierre who painted fish in profile, always on a sepia background. And after him an apologetic Japanese gentleman called Mr. San — enigmatically so since, as I now know, San is itself a term of Japanese address. Mr. San was working at Herr Ollinger’s factory as some sort of industrial spy, which in retrospect strikes me as very funny indeed, because if the Japanese ever tried copying Herr Ollinger’s methods, they must have set back their industrial output by a decade.

Finally Axel himself came slowly down the wood stairs and made his entry. For the first time Pym could regard him at his leisure. Though desperately thin, his face was by nature rounded. His brow was tall but the hank of brown hair that grew sideways over it gave it a curved and saddening air. It was as if his Maker had put His thumb and forefinger to either temple and yanked the whole face downward as a warning to his frivolity: first the hooped eyebrows, then the eyes, then the moustache which was a shaggy horseshoe. And somehow inside all this was Axel himself, his eyes twinkling out of their own shadows, the grateful survivor of something Pym was not allowed to share. One of the daughters had knitted him a sloppy cardigan which he wore like a cape over his wasted shoulders.

“Schön guten Abend, Sir Magnus,” he said. He was carrying a straw bonnet upside down. Pym saw parcels in it, beautifully wrapped. “Why do we never speak to each other up there? We could be kilometres apart instead of twenty centimetres. Are you still fighting the Germans? We are allies, you and I. Soon we shall be fighting the Russians.”

“I suppose we shall,” said Pym feebly.

“Why don’t you bang on my door once when you are lonely? We can have a cigar together, save the world a little. You like to talk nonsense?”

“Very much.”

“Okay. We talk nonsense.” But on the point of shuffling away to greet Mr. San, Axel stopped and turned. And over his caped shoulder he vouchsafed Pym a quizzical, almost challenging glare, as if asking himself whether he had invested his trust too easily.

“Aber dann können wir doch Freunde sein, Sir Magnus?”—then we may be friends after all?

“Ich würde mich freuen!” Pym replied heartily, meeting his gaze without fear — I would be happy!

They shook hands again, but this time lightly. At the same moment Axel’s features broke into such a smile of sparkling good fun that Pym’s heart filled for him in response, and he promised himself that he would follow Axel anywhere for all the Christmases that he was spared. The party began. The girls played carols and Pym sang with the best, using English words where he lacked the German. There were speeches and after them a toast to absent friends and relations, at which Axel’s long eyelids almost hid his eyes and he fell quiet. But then, as if shaking off bad memories, he stood up abruptly and began unpacking the bonnet he had brought while Pym hovered at hand to help him, knowing that this was what Axel had always done at Christmas, wherever Christmas was. For the daughters he had made musical pipes, each with her name carved along the underneath. How had he carved with such wispy white hands? So exquisitely, without Pym hearing him through the partition? Where had he found his wood, his paint and brushes? For the Ollingers he produced what I later realised was another emblem of prison life, a matchstick model. This one was an ark with painted figures of our extended family waving from the portholes. For Mr. San and Jean-Pierre he had squares of cloth of a sort that Pym had once made for Dorothy on a homemade handloom between nails. For the Basel couple a patterned woollen eye to ward off whatever was afflicting them. And for Pym — I still take it as a compliment that he left me until last — for Sir Magnus he had a much used copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, bound in old brown buckram, which Pym had not heard of but could not wait to read since it would give him an excuse to bang on Axel’s door. He opened it and read the inscription. “For Sir Magnus, who will never be my enemy.” And in the top left corner, in an older ink but in a younger version of the same hand: “A. H. Carlsbad August 1939.”